Posted by: wpd | January 24, 2007

Phone calls from computers…Vonage…forward thinking

I was pondering today about the iPhone when a thought occured to me, “What is the next evolution for making a phone call.” Well as Apple pointed out it’s as simple as clicking on a link.

My prediction is that a VOIP provider, like Vonage, will be allow people to use their computer as a phone. You may be thinking that it’s already happening–Skype, VOIP discount and others. But that’s not what I mean.

What if I could tie my computer to my Vonage service so that it acted as another phone on my account. Then I could make phone calls just by clicking on a link or clicking my friends picture in my contacts–at the OS level. Intuitively. Just a thought.

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Responses

You’re correct. Creating a layer and adding a mouse-click event that tells the OS to dial a string of numbers (whether they’re an IP address of another computer or a telephony series of digits) is actually quite simple stuff to a novice programmer (think about it, voice recognition that comes in most cell phones is relatively harder than telling the OS to dial the number associated to a picture with a physical mouse click)
But to the average consumer not aware of underlying technologies (aka. ‘behind the scenes’ ;) they really would see this as an “evolution”.

By: Zeeshan Dogar on July 3, 2007
at 10:28 pm

Yes, technology slowly evolves (hence “evolution” ;) into more advanced features. In this case, most of the underlying architecture is already there but has yet to be realized.

It also could be that my idea is really a trivial step to something much better.

The iPhone is a great example of this kind of blended layering and may offer a glimpse of ubiquity for centralizing communications.

By: wpd on July 4, 2007
at 12:54 am

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